Chief Commissioner Dorian Calloway (Human)

The report reached Calloway on the quarter's last afternoon, resolved line by line into the four words, with one line in it that was none of them.

He had expected to be annoyed and found that he was not, and spent a few minutes working out why. His office existed so that nothing arrived at the Governor's desk as a surprise. What Larsen had sent was not a surprise. A surprise is a thing somebody has and has not told you. This was an absence — fully measured, honestly bounded, and empty in the middle — and an absence cannot ambush anyone, which is precisely what the Compact's own metrology record would have been unable to say about a corrected figure.

He forwarded it to the Governor unamended, and without a covering note, which he had not done in nine quarters. Any note he could write would have said more than the paper did.

He did read the last page once more, the one with the measurements on it and nothing under them, and allowed himself the private observation that the Compact had been promised a commander who would take down a jurisdictional wall and had been given one who could tell the difference between a wall and a door, and had just declined to walk through a door that was standing open with nobody on the other side of it to object.

He did not write that down either. The quarter closed on time, with one line in it that said nothing at all, and said it correctly.